In late July 2012, the opening weekend of the film - limited to one theater in Houston, Texas (a deeply conservative city, but not the most conservative town in Texas, that honor, according to a Bay Area Center For Voting Research Survey, belongs to Lubbock) - set a noteworthy per screen average of $31,160.The distributors built slowly on that success - adding a few more theaters in the second week, and 2 more in the third, etc. Eventually the film was in 169 theaters - doing great business in select cities where there were known to be right-wing audiences who could be activated through local media and networking - like Sacramento, Dallas, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Honolulu, Greenville, N.C., and Tampa, Fla.Finally, after six weeks of positive press coverage and enthusiastic social media emanating from audiences that had seen the film in limited release, the film went wide on 1,091 carefully selected screens.In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter just prior to the wide release, the film's co-director John Sullivan attributed the film's initial success and its hope for good returns in wider release to two factors: "[W]e've expanded into good markets [and] we've been advertising nationally for two weeks on talk radio and television news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, the History Channel and MSNBC."Eventually the film went on to gross over $33 million in theaters, before being released to DVD and VOD.Bloomberg BusinessWeek has predicted that the success of “2016: Obama’s America” (a film that reportedly cost only $2.5 million) will inspire a "flood of reactionary, election-season movies." And the marketing lessons of “2016: Obama’s America” should not be lost on those other films. As co-director John Sullivan told BusinessWeek: "If you’re going to do something of this nature, you’re going to look for where there’s the most interest.”"